


A free spirit

by Hypatia_66



Category: The Man From U.N.C.L.E. (TV)
Genre: Challenge Response, Diving, Gangsters, Gen, Hurt/Comfort
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-09-01
Updated: 2017-09-01
Packaged: 2018-12-22 12:38:55
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,385
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11967570
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Hypatia_66/pseuds/Hypatia_66
Summary: Illya is at home in the sea. "You saved her, she’s saved you. Done her good deed for the day. You’re quits."





	A free spirit

The divers were coming up, now. There was only one he was looking out for, and he hadn’t emerged yet.

“Dov’è Illya – Where’s Illya?” He said to them.

“Arriva subito, amico. Non ti preoccupare – He’s coming now, chum, don’t worry.” And there was a commotion of bubbles and thrashing in the water a little further out. A head broke the surface, and an arm waved frantically. He seemed to be struggling with something, and a large dorsal fin came up beside him.

“Squalo! Shark!” shouted Napoleon, who had learned some useful words in preparation for this trip.

“No, no, calmati, amico. Solo un delfino – keep calm, it’s only a dolphin.” And with that, the creature vented its lungs with a spray of air and water, and rolled to show the fishing lines and rope that were wrapped round its body.

“Portami coltello! – Bring me a knife!” he heard Illya shout, and someone went aft, released the dinghy and rowed over to help. They watched as he came up beside the dolphin and leaned out to pass the knife, remaining to help if necessary.

It was a female; where he touched her, her body was too soft where it should have been firm – she couldn’t have eaten much recently. Carefully wielding the knife, he probed for the best place to cut the lines trapping the fin. She kept fairly still for him as he sank beneath the water and tried to find where the taut line started and whether there was an embedded hook. From time to time they sank together and she turned and twisted while he waited for her to relax again, then she would flap her tail, surface and breathe gustily – dangerous moments for her human companion, who was not only smaller, but a lot less powerful. There was always the risk of being knocked out by these massive muscular surges.

To the watching divers on the other boat, it seemed to take hours. The dolphin appeared to think so too, and attempted to roll and dive to look for help elsewhere, so that her rescuer had to cling to the dinghy for fear of being dragged down. But she came up again and turned on her side, as if begging for help.

“I’m here my darling, I’m here,” he murmured next to her invisible ear, and to his surprise, there was a muted whistle from her. She also then half-deafened him with a blast from her blowhole. Blowing me a kiss? he wondered. Some kiss.

At last, the line was cut and pulled away, releasing the fin. It left a wound, but he could do nothing about that. It would have to heal on its own in the salt water, and maybe it would if she managed to eat. He stroked the fin and her head, and said, “A presto? eh, amica – see you soon?”

She surged against him gently, rolled and dived, leaving him slightly bereft and completely exalted.

*****************

It was one thing to take part in an officially-sanctioned scuba dive for practice – but it was impossible to take a boat out with diving gear and expect to remain unnoticed, even with a diving permit. So they didn’t. There was a container of poison hidden in the bay and to circumvent the threat issued by a so-far unidentified blackmailer, it was necessary to use only the skills of someone who was as at home free-diving in water as he was walking on land. That of itself might mark him out – but Illya stood out in a crowd anywhere, especially among the olive skins of southern Europeans. There was the additional danger that the local Camorra might be watching and wondering what they were looking for. They too might be interested in a container full of a deadly toxin. It would be a useful bargaining tool.

The water looked deep out here in the huge bay; the bobbing float was attached to a long line. Napoleon watched his partner taking deep breaths in preparation for the dive, envious of his fearlessness in open waters. The slim tanned body, graceful and sleek, was for a moment caught in a perfect arc as he dived. He entered the water in a straight line – there was no splash – slid through the water like a fish and, visible in the clear blue water, he kicked his way down the line to the chest that was tethered to a rock. He must have the gills of a fish, too; Napoleon could no more have dived into such a depth of water than climb Everest, let alone hold his breath for so long. He nevertheless did hold his breath until that blond head broke the surface once more. He came up gasping for air – so it wasn’t that easy.

“I can’t open it. We’ll have to bring it up,” he called. “I’ll have to go down with hooks and lines.”

“Come back and get your breath.”

He pulled himself up in one silken movement, and slithered onto the deck like a seal, streaming water, and grinning like a boy in his enthusiasm. “It’s so beautiful down there. This is one of the most extraordinary marine environments – there is so much to see.” He lay back in the sun, relaxed and at ease. “You ought to try it,” he said, opening one eye challengingly at his friend.

“Not me, partner. This is your world – my world is of solid earth.”

Illya sat up. “Not even once?” he said, looking out at the view – the great wide bay, the volcano, and the towns and cities in its shadow.

Then, “Hey, look!” He pointed and, turning quickly, Napoleon saw a tail fluke disappearing into the water.

“A dolphin?”

“They usually go in pairs, or pods… Couldn’t be the same one again, could it? There she is again. Oh, beautiful.”

Together they watched as the steel-grey, streamlined body of the dolphin leapt and curved, a creature at home in two elements, sea and air. It turned and came to play around them, its smiling mouth daring them to join in. How could he resist? He dived in again and surfaced with the dolphin who had come to see just who had accepted its invitation. He saw the injured fin, but didn’t attempt to touch her. The dolphin, however, wanted to touch him, and butted him gently with her bottle-nose and upended, as if to challenge him to follow her down into the depths, and together they swam and dived around each other, two marine mammals, two kindred spirits.

Napoleon watched them as they disappeared under the water, and reappeared some distance away seemingly laughing at each other. Then, carefree like all wild creatures, she left him, and in arcs and curves pursued her spirit path towards the open sea.

He swam back to the boat and pulled himself aboard again. “Same one,” he said, with shining eyes.

“So I saw – you looked like soul mates, either that or she likes blonds,” said Napoleon. “That was pretty amazing – I wouldn’t have believed it possible.”

“There are lots of legends about them in Italy, and Greece too – about friendships between them and humans. One is supposed to have persuaded Amphitrite to marry Poseidon and save us from the anger of the sea.”

“Well, that didn’t work.”

“Sadly, no.”

**********************

They went below to retrieve equipment to bring up the chest, and once more Illya dived down into the depths, taking with him lines and hooks. The other marine life, cold-blooded and indifferent, largely ignored him. It took two or three dives to fix the lines, by which time he was wishing he’d been able to use breathing equipment.

Heaving on the lines, they felt the weight of the chest as it began to rise. They brought it over the side with difficulty and opened it carefully to reveal a steel cylinder.

“To think of leaving this in such a fragile environment – it could have poisoned the whole bay.”

Napoleon grunted, and said, “Might be an idea to put the chest back now, in case someone comes to check. Are you up to another dive? You’ve been down there a lot in quite a short time. Aren’t you afraid of blacking out?”

“I’m fine. I’ll go down with it, and come straight back when I’ve reattached it to the rock.”

As he was doing that, Napoleon hid the cylinder behind what was designed to look like a fixed bulkhead in the cabin and went back on deck to watch for his partner. Illya’s head appeared above the surface and he now looked very tired. Napoleon leaned over to help him back on deck, and as he did so, he saw a splash near the boat. Then another. Someone was firing warning shots at them. There was a boat approaching, still some distance away.

“Swim round to the other side,” he called, “it’s too dangerous to get out here.” But his partner had gone under, leaving an ominous stain in the water. He had thought the splashes were too far away for them to have hit anything, but bullets could ricochet off water, like a skimmed stone. Maybe he had swum underneath, but Illya hadn’t made a sound – it might have got him in the head. Oh, no…

Napoleon crawled over to the other side, and peered down into the water. There was no sign of him. He would have to get in himself before Illya drowned, if he wasn’t dead already. The shooting continued and the splashes were falling nearer. Shoes off, he was about to let himself down into the water – it was a brave but foolhardy thing for a poor swimmer to attempt – when there was a burst of spray and a smell of fish from beside him.

It was the dolphin, gazing up at him with her dark, intelligent eye. And spread-eagled over her back, the limp body of his partner, his head lolling to one side of her dorsal fin.

She lay quiet on the surface as he reached down to grab Illya’s arm, and as his body slid off her, she turned over, continuing to support him. Napoleon, leaning perilously over the side, his legs firmly round a stanchion, dragged him up and onto the deck and started mouth-to-mouth resuscitation and heart massage. He could swear that the dolphin was calling; she was giving little whistles and clicks.

Illya’s body heaved under the compressions and he turned him quickly. Water gushed from his mouth and nose; he took a gasping, coughing breath, and an answering high-pitched squeak sounded from nearby. Wiping sweat from his brow, Napoleon looked round to see where the other boat had got to, but it had disappeared, perhaps discouraged by some small boats sailing out from the harbour. It probably wouldn’t be for long because they were starting to move away.

He looked at his friend – there was a graze along his temple. The bullet must have been at the end of its trajectory and had lost momentum before it ricocheted off the water and knocked him out.

The dolphin had ceased squeaking; she had probably gone. “Let’s get you into the cabin and out of the sun,” he muttered. 

********************

It was fortunate that they had completed both the concealment of the cylinder and the restoration of the chest, because a few minutes later the other boat arrived. Also fortunately, the float that would have betrayed their interest in the area was hidden by their own boat. There was a bump on the hull, and voices. Napoleon climbed up the companionway to find that five or six men, all with guns, were crowded on the deck. Local camorristi apparently, judging from their appearance, but what they thought they wanted was destined to remain a mystery, as they shared no common language.

“Hi, fellas,” said Napoleon, proving this with his ignorant-American-tourist spiel. “What’s wrong? Am I in the wrong parking lot, or something?” They ignored this, so he added, “We need a doctor. My friend fell in and banged his head. He nearly drowned. He’s ill – Dottore… amico ammalato.”

Ignoring this, too, they gestured him to stay where he was, and three of them went down into the cabin.

Illya had heard the commotion, and, because just lying down had agitated the water remaining in his lungs and stomach, when the gunmen piled down into the cabin he looked convincingly ill, vomiting into a bucket. Paying no attention to his distressing spasms, they searched the cabin, including his bunk, which they did by moving him bodily onto the one opposite – moderately carefully, to avoid upsetting the bucket over themselves. Finding nothing, they withdrew angrily, amid mutual recriminations, and, shouting unintelligible threats at Napoleon, they returned to their boat.

*********************

“How did I get here?” Illya’s voice was a rasp, and he coughed again.

“Your friendly cetacean found you and carried you up to the surface.”

“Really? Wow…” His damp, pallid skin flushed suddenly. “Help me up on deck. Is she still there?”

“She’s gone, chum. You saved her, she’s saved you. Done her good deed for the day. You’re quits.”

Illya sat on deck, looking out to sea and coughing painfully from time to time. The sunlight glittering on the waves blinded him so that, when she came, he didn’t see her until she gasped a greeting beside him.

She lay there on the surface, making little clicks. They looked at each other for a long moment, then he reached a hand down to her. “Thank you,” he said. Ignoring his hand, she surged up, almost standing on the water to look at him, then she sank back, turned over, and disappeared, only to burst from the water few yards away in a series of ecstatic leaps which she performed around them as they watched. Then she dived and they saw her no more.

“We’d better get going,” said Napoleon, an unwonted emotion roughening his voice a little. “We need to get rid of this cylinder. Better make for Sorrento. You stay where you are. Are you OK?”

“I’m fine. Never better,” he coughed, “… I’m in love.”

“You realise she probably thinks of you like a calf now, in need of protection?”

He turned his back on this frivolous observation and looked out to sea. “I like older women.”

********************


End file.
